Free The Merchant's War by Frederik Pohl Page B

her heart was in the right place. I gave her bottom a friendly pat and swaggered toward the lift.
    And the first person I saw on forty-five as I let go of the handbar was Mitzi Ku.
    I’d had twenty-four hours to get over resentment at that lawsuit deal. It hadn’t been enough, really, but at least the sharp edges of jealousy had blunted a bit, and she really looked good. Not perfect. Although she was out of her bandages, that funny blurring around the eyes and mouth told you she was wearing plastiflesh where healing had not quite finished. But she was smiling at me tentatively as she said hello. “Mitzi,” I said, the words popping out of my mouth unexpectedly —I had not known I had been thinking them —“shouldn’t I sue the tram people, too?”
    She looked embarrassed. What she would have said I don’t know, because from behind her Val Dambois popped out. “Too late, Tarb,” he said. I didn’t mind the words. I minded the contemptuous tone, and the grin. “Statute of limitations, you know? Like I told you, you missed the boat. Come on, Mitzi, we can’t keep the Old Man waiting—”
    The morning was one shock after another; the Old Man was who I was going to see. Mitzi allowed Dambois to take her arm, but she hung back to peer at me. “Are you all right, Tenny?” she asked.
    “I’m fine—” Well, I was, mostly, not counting a slightly frayed ego. “I’m a little thirsty, maybe, because it’s so hot in here. Do you happen to know if there’s a Mokie-Koke vending machine on this floor?”
    Dambois gave me a poisonous look. “Some jokes,” he gritted, “are in lousy taste.”
    I watched him flounce off, dragging Mitzi after him into the Old Man’s sanctum. I sat down to wait, trying to look as though I had simply decided to rest my feet there for a moment.
    The moment turned out to be well past an hour.
    Of course, nobody thought anything of that. Over in her own corner of the cell the Old Man’s sec 3 kept busy with her communicator and her data screen, glancing up to smile at me now and then the way she was paid to do. People who wait only an hour to see the Old Man generally gave thanks for their blessings, since most people never got to see him at all. Old Man Gatchweiler was a legend in his own time, poor boy, consumer stock, who rose out of obscure origins to pull off so grand a scam that it was still whispered about in the Executive Country bars. Two of the grandest old-line Agencies had wrecked themselves in flaming scandals, old B. J. Taunton nailed for Contract Breach, Fowler Schocken dead and his Agency in ruins. Their Agencies carried on a spectral existence as shells, written off forever by the wiseacres. Then Horatio Gatchweiler appeared out of nowhere to swallow the wreckage and turn it into T., G. & S. No one wrote Taunton, Gatchweiler and Schocken off! We were tops in Sales and Service. Our clients led the charts in Sales, and as to Service, well, no thousand-dollar-a-hit stallion ever serviced his mares as thoroughly as we serviced the consumers. A name to conjure with, Horatio Gatchweiler! It was almost liter ally a name to conjure with, for it was like the unspeakable name of God. No one ever spoke it. Behind his back he was the “Old Man,” to his face nothing but “sir.”
    So sitting in his tiny sec 3 ‘s anteroom while I pretended to study the Advertising Age hourlies in the tabletop screen was nothing new for me. It was even an honor. At least, it would have been except for the sulky, nagging annoyance at the fact that he had given Mitzi and Val Dambois precedence.
    When at last the Old Man’s sec 3 turned me over to the sec 2 , who led me to the secretary, who admitted me to his own private office, he did try to make me welcome. He didn’t stand up or anything, but, “Come right in, Farb!” he boomed jovially from his chair. “Good to see you back, boy!”
    I had almost forgotten how magnificent his place was—two windows! Of course, both had the shades drawn;